


Playing with Uranium

by BlameTheMachines



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Creepy Slade Wilson, Dick Grayson is Renegade, M/M, Nightwing (1996) #93, Past Rape/Non-con, Threats of Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 10:47:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21135458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlameTheMachines/pseuds/BlameTheMachines
Summary: Slade invites Dick into his study for a friendly chat about Rose’s training. It goes poorly.





	Playing with Uranium

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during Dick's Renegade arc, so probably somewhere around Nightwing #114. There are references to past rape (Slade brings up the whole Catalina Flores/Tarantula unpleasantness, because he's creepy like that), as well as threatened/attempted rape (again, because Slade is creepy like that), but nothing too explicit. Basically, this is my attempt to flesh out a story arc that had all the potential in the world, but which, for me, was ultimately unsatisfying.

He walked Rose all the way home and insisted on entering the darkened lodge with her, even though Rose sighed impatiently and pointed out that she could easily break the neck of any miscreant who dared to mess with her. All of which was true, but was also beside the point: Rose might be the daughter of one of the world’s most formidable killers and a skilled fighter in her own right, but she was also a teenager, and Dick firmly believed the adults of the world had a duty to let teens know someone had their backs, that there was someone out there who’d make sure they didn’t have to go it alone. So he ignored the huffed sighs and the dramatic eye rolls and deposited her safely in the foyer.

They were both in full costume, even though they hadn’t been on a mission. They’d been training out in the open, though, and someone could have spotted them, and it was important to maintain good habits.

The lodge was quiet. The fire in the fireplace had burned down to glowing embers, which provided just enough light to exaggerate the shadows cast by the taxidermied animal heads mounted on the wall. Dick stood on the stone floor beneath a low-hanging chandelier made of antlers and faced Rose. “I’ll leave you here. You did a good job tonight. We’ll work on hand-to-hand combat in the gym tomorrow, okay?”

Rose yawned. “Okay. Not too early, though. You kept me out too late.” There was a soft whine to her tone that made Dick smile. He’d been a whiner, too, in his early days of training with Bruce.

They turned in unison at the sound of a door opening. Slade Wilson leaned in the doorway of his study and observed them. “How’d it go tonight, kids?”

“Okay, I guess.” Rose shrugged. The corner of Slade’s mouth twitched, as though he was entertained by his daughter’s teen ennui, and then he glanced over at Dick. The brow above his good eye raised, waiting for a more informative response from his daughter’s teacher.

“It went well. We climbed up and down buildings throughout the warehouse district. I showed Rose how to use a grappling hook,” Dick said.

That earned him another eye roll. “I already knew how, but whatever.”

“Pay close attention to Grayson, kiddo. Despite his messy personal choices, he knows what he’s doing in the field. You can learn a lot from watching his technique.” Slade jerked his head toward the staircase. “Off to bed with you. It’s late.”

Rose stood on her tiptoes to give her dad a quick peck on the cheek. “Goodnight, daddy.”

“Sleep tight, sweetheart.” Slade clasped his big hands on her narrow shoulders and brought her in for a firm hug. He planted a kiss on the top of her head. Their matching father-daughter eyepatches aside, for one fleeting moment, they looked like an uncomplicated family unit.

“See you tomorrow, Renegade.” Rose threw a wave at Dick over her shoulder as she scampered up the stairs and disappeared into darkness.

As soon as she was gone, Dick gave Slade a curt nod and turned to leave. Slade’s voice stopped him before he reached the door. “Stick around, Grayson.”

He paused. Making small talk with Deathstroke wasn’t his first pick for how to close out a long evening, but the more time he spent with Slade, the more he might be able to glean about the inner workings of the Secret Society. He kept his expression neutral and followed Slade into his study.

The lodge’s upmarket huntsman decor continued into Slade’s private sanctum, from the rustic stonework lining the walls to the animal hides on the floor. Slade gestured for him to sit on the oxblood loveseat. “Take off your mask,” he said.

Dick hesitated. “Why?” he asked. It wasn’t his Nightwing domino; this was the half-face mask and partial cowl he wore for his largely improvised costume as Renegade, and even after several weeks of daily wear, he still hadn’t grown used to it. But it provided a barrier between himself and Slade, flimsy as it might be, and he was reluctant to ditch it.

“Because it looks stupid. Because I want to see your pretty face when I talk to you,” Slade said. He strode over to a brass bar cart against the wall, hoisted a heavy decanter, and poured a healthy splash of what Dick assumed was Scotch into a pair of lowball glasses. “Rocks, water?”

“Neat is fine,” Dick replied. He felt a surge of reflexive distaste at the idea of sharing a drink with a mortal enemy, but refusing would cause friction, and his goal was to keep his relationship with Slade on as even a keel as possible for as long as he could. He unfastened his mask at the back and pulled it over his head. His hair promptly fell in his eyes; irritated, he raked it back with the fingers of one hand.

“Good boy.” Slade handed him one of the glasses and raised his own in a toast. “Cheers.”

Dick sipped. It tasted of smoke and peat and fire, and knowing Slade’s tastes, the bottle probably cost more than Dick’s life.

Slade regarded him in silence, his one good eye steady and unblinking. He wore a smoking jacket in bottle green velvet over an open-necked white shirt that matched his thick and unruly hair. The fingernails on the hand that clutched his lowball glass were neatly manicured; a chunky gold watch glinted beneath the long French cuffs of his shirt. Apart from the eyepatch, he looked moneyed and genteel, like a titan of industry on the cusp of retirement. He could blend in seamlessly with Gotham’s wealthy elite.

He was silent for so long that Dick began to feel a flicker of tension, which was surely the intent. When Slade spoke at last, Dick felt relieved the question was so innocuous: “How’s she doing?”

Dick considered. “She’s good. She’s got the innate skills; it’s just a matter of refining them. She’s a fast learner, and her instincts are solid. She still has trouble listening and following instructions, but…” He shrugged. “Show me one teenager who doesn’t.”

“_You_ didn’t.” Slade snorted. “Come on, kid, I’ve known you since you were still wearing the short pants. You’ve always been a golden boy. That’s why it’s so precious watching you pretending to be a bad guy.”

“Pretending?” Dick took another cautious sip of his Scotch. The glass, made of lead crystal, was heavy in his hand. “Haven’t we gone over this, Deathstroke?”

“I guess we have, _Renegade_, but it still doesn’t make any damn sense.” Slade settled into a leather chair across from Dick and rested his glass on his knee. His smoking jacket seemed tailored too closely to his upper body to accommodate a holster, and Dick had no idea where else he could hide a gun or sword on his person, but even here, in the sanctity of his home, Deathstroke would certainly be armed. “So you killed Blockbuster, and you feel dirty for violating the Bat’s moral code, so now you’ve decided the only course left open to you is to renounce your superhero past and join me and my associates in a life of villainy. Did I get your story right?”

Dick felt a wave of exhaustion course over him at the mention of Blockbuster. “Close enough,” he said.

“No, I have the details wrong, don’t I?” Slade creased his brow in exaggerated confusion. “You didn’t kill him. Your bad-mannered protégé killed him, and you feel dirty because you didn’t, I don’t know, fling yourself in front of her bullet or whatever act of heroic idiocy the Bat would expect out of you.” He shook his head. “You’re a smart kid, but he’s filled your head with all kinds of silly moralistic claptrap.”

Dick smiled. It felt a little tight on his face. “The sanctity of human life isn’t some crazy fringe opinion, Wilson. Refusing to kill is the default moral position of most people. Unless, of course, you’re an assassin.”

“I’m a mercenary, kid. Get it straight.” Slade smiled briefly, gracing Dick with a flash of teeth. “What was the name of that little protégé of yours? Black Widow, something like that?”

Nerve endings whispered hushed warnings of danger up and down Dick’s spine. It took more of an effort now to keep his expression composed. “Tarantula. Catalina Flores.”

“Yeah. Flores.” Another quick smile. “She’s serving a healthy sentence at Alcatraz these days, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. Well. I heard some juicy gossip about Flores.” Slade leaned forward. “You want to hear it? You have a starring role.”

His face felt warm. If he’d just kept his mask on, he’d have an easier time hiding his reactions. “You’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

“You bet your legendary ass I am.” The sole working eye winked at him, slow and deliberate, the simple gesture somehow filled with lurid insinuation. “See, nothing about your current career trajectory was making much sense to me, so I did some snooping. A lady friend of my professional acquaintance is presently enjoying a government-sponsored all-expenses-paid vacation at Alcatraz, so I asked her to bring up your name to Flores and see what happens. Turns out she’s got a lot to say. Flores doesn’t like you too much these days.”

“I don’t suppose she does. I turned her in to the cops for Blockbuster’s murder.”

“Accuracy counts, kid. You turned yourself in as well,” Slade said. “But only one of you got arrested, because contrary to whatever Batman has led you to believe, failing to stop a bad guy from killing another bad guy is not actually a capital crime.”

He paused. When Dick didn’t reply, Slade shrugged and continued. “Flores told my lady friend she’d been your girlfriend, that after she killed Blockbuster the two of you were going to get married, and then out of nowhere, you turned on her.”

“Where’s this going, Wilson?” Good, he sounded nonchalant yet bored, all outer signs of his mounting agitation kept carefully under wraps. Slade knew something, _goddamn_ he knew something, but maybe he didn’t know everything, and there was no sense in confirming there was more to the story.

“I’ll get there. I’m just trying to sort this mess out. Blockbuster murders a bunch of your friends and neighbors because he’s royally pissed off at you. From all reports, the guy was a psychotic asshole, but I’ve been royally pissed off at you enough times that I kind of get where he was coming from.” Slade took a long drink of his Scotch before continuing. “So Flores kills Blockbuster, and you, you’re so messed up about all this that you don’t stop her. So you… run away with her and almost get married before you decided to turn her in for murder instead?” Slade shook his head. “No. That doesn’t work for me. I don’t like it. It’s clumsy. If that were the plot of a screenplay, I’d call for a rewrite.”

Dick took another sip of his drink to give himself time to compose a response. A tiny sip, because he could already feel it starting to work on him, forming a warm glow in the pit of his stomach, and keeping all his wits about him was a necessity when tangling with Slade. “Yeah, well, real human behavior isn’t as tidy as it is in the movies, is it?”

“Let’s piece this together, shall we?” Slade tilted his head to the side and observed Dick, bemused. “The Flores woman shoots Blockbuster. You’re injured and exhausted from battling the freak, and you’re devastated by what you see as your crippling moral failure in not stopping Flores, so your first instinct is to get the hell out of there. You head up to the roof to get some air, and you collapse from shock.”

“Did Catalina tell your friend this?” He aimed to keep his tone light and careless, but it sounded strained to his ears.

“Nah. She didn’t need to. Like I said, I did some snooping.” Slade smiled. “You were off your game that night. Uncharacteristically sloppy. At any other time, you would’ve realized there were security cameras on that rooftop. ”

Security cameras. _Jesus_. He should have thought of that. He should have looked for them. In the wake of Blockbuster’s murder, in the wake of Tarantula’s… in the wake of everything that had happened, he’d never thought to return to that rooftop to make sure no evidence had been left behind. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “That night…”

Slade watched him carefully, waiting for him to say more. Dick shook his head once, indicating he was done. Security cameras. Slade Wilson—_Deathstroke_, damn it—knew everything, all because he’d been sloppy.

“I watched the security tape, kid.” If Dick didn’t know Slade so well, he’d say he looked concerned. Compassionate, even. “You collapsed on the roof. You were flat on your back, clearly out of it. And Flores… well, from the tape, it sure looks like she took advantage of that. She rode you like a circus pony, and I sure didn’t see any signs you were okay with that.”

That was it. That was the whole story, and there was no sense denying it. “I don’t really remember what she did,” Dick said. He shook his head. “Bits and pieces, if I focus on it, but it was all a part of… It was a bad night.”

“I’ll say. Bitch raped you.”

It was impossible to maintain eye contact with Slade. He looked around the study, at the mahogany desk against the far wall, at the bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes, at the array of African tribal masks hanging near the door, at the zebra rug covering the stone floor. “She didn’t do anything I didn’t deserve,” he said at last.

Slade let out a low whistle. “Kid, that’s the single most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard you say, and I’ve heard a lot of nonsense from you over the years.” He shifted forward in his chair. The movement caught Dick’s attention, adrenaline priming him for an attack. He looked up.

Slade continued. “What she did to you, that wasn’t punishment. That was just an opportunistic C-list criminal grabbing the chance while you were helpless to do to you what she knew you wouldn’t let her do while you were in possession of all your senses. And then you stuck with her to punish yourself some more for your failures. How close am I?”

“If this mercenary thing doesn’t work out for you, maybe you should consider a career as a therapist.” Dick rose to his feet. “We’re done here. Hope you enjoyed the tape.”

“Honestly? Yeah, I did.” Slade stood as well, setting his empty glass on the coffee table. “Picture quality was for shit, but I thought it was hot. You’ve always been gorgeous, kid. I know plenty of my, ah, professional associates would jump at the chance to get into your tights while you were unconscious or incapacitated. Or drugged.” He nodded at Dick’s glass. “Just as a general life rule, you should probably be more careful about accepting drinks from supervillains.”

The blood seemed to drain from his head all at once. Dick looked at the half-filled glass in his hand. “You didn’t—”

“I didn’t.” Slade took the glass from Dick’s numb hand and drained the contents in a single swallow. “I’ve got my kinks, but unlike our girl Flores, somnophilia isn’t one of ‘em. If I get the urge to scratch that particular itch, you’ll be awake.”

Dick barked out a laugh, short and incredulous. “Lucky me. How does that scenario play out in your head, Wilson? You think I’d, what, be so charmed by your smooth patter that I’d agree to fall into bed with you?”

Slade’s eye narrowed. “It’s cute that you think I’d ask you for permission first.”

He was close, too close, mere inches of space between them, and Dick’s survival instincts were sounding the alarm. It was reckless to willingly stay in the same room as Deathstroke; it was madness to let him stand within slicing range. Dick had to forcibly override the voice in his head telling him to immediately put some distance between them.

Instead, he relaxed. Slade was a predator, and fleeing would only inspire him to chase down his prey. He shook his head. “You’ve always been a creepy motherfucker, Wilson, but I doubt rape is your style,” he said.

“No, of course not. I’m far too noble and soft-hearted to force myself on you.” Slade moved forward, his movements shockingly fast and graceful considering his size, and Dick found his back pressed up against the cold stones of the wall. Slade pinned him with one hand pressed to his clavicle, his fingers spread against the fabric of Dick’s Renegade costume. His other hand dropped to Dick’s hip.

Slade tilted his head down until their faces were centimeters apart, his breath warm on his nose. When he spoke, it was almost a hiss. “Perhaps you need a refresher course on who you’re dealing with. I’ve murdered far more people than you’ve saved in all your years as a volunteer do-gooder. You really think I draw the line at rape?”

Dick didn’t move. “You’re going to want to let go of me,” he said quietly.

Slade smiled without showing his teeth. “Or what? You’ll hit me with your little sticks?”

“That’s right.” Dick smiled back at him. “And then I’ll hit you some more, and furniture will get broken, and we’ll wake the household, and the next thing you know, Rose will be down here wondering why her gross dad is trying to fuck her teacher.”

Slade was silent for a moment, and then he laughed. He released Dick and stepped back. “You’ve always been a mouthy little bitch, Grayson.”

Dick shook his head. “It’s been real, Wilson.” He retrieved his mask from where he’d left it on the coffee table and headed for the study door.

“Hey.” Slade wrapped his hand around his forearm as he passed and gave it a light tug. Dick paused.

“Stay,” Slade said. He shook his head as Dick’s expression darkened. “On your own terms. Scratch that itch. I’ve never seen you this messed up, Grayson, and a good, hard fuck might be just what you need to clear your pretty head. Stay.”

For a crazy, reckless, demented moment, Dick allowed himself the luxury of entertaining that possibility. Slade was his enemy, and he was one of the most lethal and ruthless people Dick had ever encountered, and yet… It was just barely possible Slade had a point, that tumbling into bed with him for a commitment-free romp would rid him of some of the nervous gloom and the guilt and rage that had clung to him over the past months.

And it might be one hell of an enlightening experience, too.

And then the moment passed, and cold, hard common sense returned. “Tell Rose I’ll see her in the gym tomorrow at eight.”

Slade shrugged. “Your loss,” he said, and something in his tone indicated he knew exactly what Dick had been thinking.

Slade followed him to the foyer and held the front door open for him. He waited until Dick had stepped outside before speaking again. “You want Flores dead, say the word. Call it a professional courtesy.”

“Catalina is exactly where she should be, Slade. Leave her alone.”

“The offer stands.” Slade leaned closer. “And while you mull it over, let me give you another thing to think about: Do I want to kill her because I’m angry about what she did to you, or because I’m jealous she got to you before I had the chance?”

Dick stared at him for a moment, then headed down the front steps of the lodge. “Goodnight, Wilson,” he said without turning around.

“Sleep tight, Renegade,” Slade said to his retreating back. There was a note in his voice Dick hadn’t heard before, and it chilled him. The ground between them had shifted somehow, disrupting the balance of their uneasy partnership, and Dick had the ominous feeling Deathstroke now presented more of a danger to him than ever before.

Six weeks later, Blüdhaven would lie in fiery ruins, more than a hundred thousand dead from Chemo’s attack, which was planned and executed by Deathstroke and his nefarious allies in the Secret Society. After the initial tide of unmanageable chaos, fury, and grief had ebbed, Dick had plenty of time to think about it from all angles. That the attack had been designed at least in part to cause him specific pain was a given; the choice of Blüdhaven, out of all the cities in the world, established that beyond a doubt. Dick knew in his bones that the seeds of that decision had been planted that night in Slade Wilson’s study. Slade had been aware of—and perhaps alarmed by—the shifting ground between them. Dick had gotten under his skin, even in just a small and seemingly insignificant way, and Slade had selected the nuclear option to wipe out a perceived weakness in his otherwise impenetrable armor.

Someday, Dick would get vengeance for Blüdhaven. Maybe he’d be able to get under Deathstroke’s skin again; maybe that would be the sharpest, cruelest way to cause him some real damage. Someday their respective trajectories would collide again, and when they did, Dick swore to himself that Slade Wilson wouldn’t survive the impact.


End file.
